Inspiring Images

By Luke Wink-Moran

In 1993, Mariel Miranda and her mother moved from Mexico City to a neighborhood in Tijuana—called Las Cumbres—to live with her father in a small one-story house surrounded by olive trees. 

“There were only ten houses in the whole neighborhood,” said Miranda. “We didn’t have electricity, or plumbing, nothing. Just this beautiful piece of land from which you can see the sea. And at night I saw the stars as I never saw them before.”

It was in Las Cumbres, not long after arriving, that Mariel discovered an enduring medium in her artistic development—collages.

“People always think that my relationship with art began when I took my first art class,” Miranda explained. “But really, it began when I was a kid and my father taught me to make collages, just as a way to pass time at night. I mean, we didn’t have a TV. We had to do something, right?”

Miranda and her father would spend hours making collages by candlelight, using whatever materials her father could find. They posted the finished pieces in school notebooks, on surfaces around the kitchen, or wherever else they seemed to belong.

“We did that for many, many years,” Miranda recalled. “And then I taught my little brother how to do it, too. I suppose it’s an activity that we pass down from generation to generation.”

Miranda discovered the beauty of another kind of collage in her childhood community.

“Growing up in Las Cumbres, you learn to depend on your friendships and the trust that you establish with your community. Your neighbors are not just your neighbors; they become your family. The neighbor in front of our house, Senora Teresa—Doña Tere—was like my grandmother. Our other neighbors were like my aunts and cousins.”

Every family in the neighborhood came from a similar socioeconomic background and faced the same challenges. They forged close bonds as they worked to build better lives for themselves and each other.

“Doña Tere was like the president of the neighborhood. And the first thing she pushed and fought for was to build a school,” said Miranda. “At the time, there were only fifteen kids in the neighborhood. And some might say, ‘Well, maybe there were some higher priorities, like electricity.’ But for her, the school was more important.”

Senora Teresa convinced politicians to give her a piece of land and the materials to build a school, “and then the parents gathered the materials, the wood and nails and everything, and they built the first classroom.”

After finishing high school, Miranda—then 17—left home to study photography and sociology at the Universidad Autonoma de Baja. There she learned about the work of a photographer from San Diego named Don Bartletti who documented the journey of a 13-year-old boy travelling alone in “The Beast,” a train that migrants rode to the north of Mexico. The boy was traveling to join his mother, who was already in California.

“When I saw Don Bartletti’s work, I thought to myself, ‘That’s the kind of work that I want to do with my photography,’” Miranda remembered. “It was a beautiful coincidence that sociology gave me the theoretical foundation to understand the potential of photography as a method of communication.”

Miranda embarked on her first multidisciplinary photography project not long after. Fotógrafos Ambulantes (walking photographers) began as her senior thesis and filled the next four years of her life. The project presented the lives and struggles of professional photographers who worked in Tijuana, taking pictures of everything that happened in a city street over time.

“The fotógrafos ambulantes were extremely important for the cultural memory of Tijuana,” said Miranda. “But all of a sudden, no one needed their work because of cell phones.”

To capture their history and their art, she set out to make a video documentary about the photographers. Then she had an unexpected breakthrough. The artists she was filming began to share their family photos with Miranda. They packed hundreds of images into boxes-- photos of spouses, children, friends, and more-- for her to catalogue, scan, and preserve. 

“Working with those documents, holding them in my hands, was a life-changing experience,” explained Miranda. “You realize that these documents are charged—they’re heavy with so much meaning.”

She worked with the familys’ collections for years, creating an archive of images that traced which photo had been taken by which artist on what street, and even what type of camera had been used. 

“In the end, we presented the work in the city’s two most important museums,” said Miranda. On display are “the original images, tiny, beautiful polaroids and the strange cut that the photographer decided to make instead of a perfect square. Other images were scanned and reproduced in the size of a wall.”

Fotógrafos Ambulates inspired Mariel’s interest in developing archives. She wanted to use images to create new possibilities for readings and lectures. To that end, she and five friends started the Festival Internacional de Fotografía Tijuana, which ran for a month and featured lectures, exhibitions, and activities.

“And we did it with no money, just making trades with people, using the contacts that you have, or your friends have, people who will lend you 20 bottles of tequila so you can make drinks and use the money from selling the drinks to pay for something else,” said Miranda.

“The thing I learned from my childhood, from my community, is that if you have a clear horizontal organization with other people who have things in common with you, you can achieve big projects.”

Miranda continued to attend classes, and after taking three year-long seminars on contemporary art and photography, her identity as an artist began to crystallize. “I realized that I’m not just someone who does research and sometimes includes photography and video,” she said. “I’m a visual artist whose practice is highly informed by research and sociology.”

Not long after her realization, Miranda gave a lecture on one of her portfolios in San Diego. A month later she received a call from the Chair of the University of Arizona’s MFA in Studio Art program, who had been in attendance. He invited her to join the School of Fine Arts and the University Fellows Program. Miranda accepted and moved to Tucson.

“It’s been another life-changing experience,” she said. “Being a University Fellow is wonderful, especially for someone living in a new community, in a new university, speaking a new language. It’s all very uncertain, but every session with the Fellows felt like a safe space.”

After graduation, Miranda plans to work in a museum or in higher education, “but ultimately I want to move back to Tijuana. My brother and I have this dream in the back of our minds, in our hearts, to build a cultural center for our neighbors and their kids. We want to provide free classes, an exhibition space, a space for research, and philosophy lessons.” It will be a collage of opportunities for creativity, growth, and connection.

Work on the cultural center has already begun; just outside of Mariel’s childhood home in Las Cumbres—now a beautiful two-story house made of durable concrete—there is a building that was once a small convenience store, or tiendita, run by Mariel’s mother. The money from the tiendita paid for Mariel and her brother’s education, and anything left over was spent remodeling the house. For the past few years, the building has been a storage space. But now Mariel’s brother is cleaning it out and filling it with books, the beginnings of a community library.

Other things in Las Cumbres have changed. Continued lobbying for electricity, running water, and public transportation has successfully raised the standard of living, and the community continues to take new steps towards the future. But the olive trees are still there, and the sea is still just a few miles away.

To see Mariel Miranda’s published work, visit her website, marielmira.com, or check out her Instagram @mariiel.mira.